The Forbidden Planet (REDUX 3/27/08)

 

 

Synopsis; An expedition is sent from Earth to Altair in the constellation of Aquilae (some 17 light years from Earth) to discover what happened to a colony of settlers on its fourth planet, Altair-4. What they discover is how and why an alien race of geniuses (The Krell) destroyed itself overnight while leaving their technology intact at some point in the distant, distant past.

This is of course one of the greatest movies of all time. Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still set the mold for much else that would follow in the sci-fi genre. Both films set the bar very, very high for storytelling in the realm of humankind's possible psychological development.

 

I Love Me Some Chlorine Bleach - But Clorox Needs To Be Shot With Hot Pee For This!

undark  |  As a second wave of Covid-19 infections tore through the United States in the summer of 2020, a partnership was forged between the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s premiere medical centers, and the Clorox Company, the California-based ­­­­­­­maker of surface disinfectants. Sales of Clorox products had been soaring since the beginning of the pandemic, when public health agencies were still warning that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, could lurk on surfaces, sickening people who touched them. The company’s stock was also soaring, and at times it struggled to keep up with demand.

Under the partnership, the company and the clinic would co-produce public health guidelines to help the public navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. The arrangement continued into March of this year, when the CDC Foundation — an independent nonprofit chartered by Congress to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — joined the group. Their ongoing campaign, the Clorox Safer Today Alliance, includes ads for the brand that bear the Cleveland Clinic and CDC Foundation logos. The Alliance advises companies — including United Airlines and AMC Theatres — and individuals on navigating Covid-19 reopening, with an emphasis on disinfecting surfaces. 

This seemingly benevolent union in the name of public health has a problem, critics say: a lack of compelling evidence that surface disinfection plays any significant role in halting the spread of Covid-19. Despite early speculation among experts that surface contact was a key mode of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and subsequent rush among consumers to purchase cleaning products at the outset of the pandemic, the science supporting frequent surface disinfection as a response to Covid-19 has largely faltered, many experts say.

Indeed, after nearly 18 months of investigation, most scientists believe that airborne transmission is the chief concern, and that overuse of surface disinfectants may well do more harm than good. “Your efforts at cleaning are better spent towards cleaning the air than cleaning the surfaces,” said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and a prominent expert on Covid-19 transmission.

Given this, the continued relationship between two major public health organizations and the Clorox Company — which appears well positioned to profit from a particular interpretation of the science — has some critics raising pointed questions about the appropriateness of the arrangement and the misleading messages it might send to consumers. It also comes amid ongoing scrutiny by experts and advocates of the effects of corporate donations on scientific research and public health. Clorox donated $1 million to the Cleveland Clinic this spring, and a press release for the Safer Today Alliance notes that the company also donated $1 million to the CDC Foundation in early 2020.

 

Coronavirus Blues: No Matter How Good The Chicken, Cain't Be No Finger Lickin!

nydailynews |  Kentucky Fried Chicken is suspending its signature slogan — for obvious reasons.

On Friday, the fast food chain announced it would suspend an advertising campaign focused on its famous “finger lickin’ good” motto amid the coronavirus crisis.

According to The Independent, Advertising Standards Authority — the self-regulatory agency focused on the British advertising industry — received 163 complaints about the U.K.-based television ads that started running in February.

“Our team in the UK didn’t feel like it was the right time to be airing this particular advertisement, so they’ve decided to pause it for now,” a KFC spokesperson told the Daily News Monday evening.

Weeks ago, the American-headquartered fried chicken giant announced a search for a “professional finger licker” willing to show off their skills with a widespread billboards campaign that went up across Britain.

With health officials all over the world stressing the dire importance for hygiene and hand-washing, the idea of any kind of finger-licking doesn’t quite strike the right tone.

For the time being, there won’t be any ads featuring people licking their fingers after eating the company’s flagship product. The slogan was trademarked by KFC, also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, in 1956,

Exact Same Elite Marketing Playbook and Script For Nobody Diversity Candidate Bootyplug

On March 16th 2008 I called out and subsequently rejected the Great "Unifier" after he made his responsible negroe speech and repudiated Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Like Obama, Cheat Bootyplug is a nobody selected by elites from sociopath central casting for the purpose of installing a republican blue dog as the head of the DNC corporatist shill party. Bootyplug is toast with Black and Latino voters, so I'm not quite sure who his handlers thought he could "unify" with his glib, empty rhetoric.

Obama has pegged his Jeremiah Wright response to the speech delivered by Bobby Kennedy in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination;

Kennedy was the first to inform the audience of the death of Martin Luther King, causing some in the audience to scream and wail. Several of Kennedy's aides were even worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. Once the audience quieted down Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger, especially since the assassin was believed to be a white, and that he had felt the same when his brother John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. These remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak of John Kennedy's death. Kennedy continued, saying that the country had to make an effort to "go beyond these rather difficult times," and then quoted a poem by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. To conclude Kennedy said that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites, asked the audience members to pray for the King family and the country, and once more quoted the ancient Greeks. Despite rioting in other major American cities, Indianapolis was calm the night after Kennedy's remarks, which is believed to have been in part because of the speech. The speech itself has been listed as one of the greatest in American history, ranked 17th on American Rhetoric's Top 100 speeches in the 20th century. Former US Congressman and media host Joe Scarborough said that it was Kennedy's greatest speech, and was what prompted him into entering into public service. Journalist Joe Klein has called it "politics in its grandest form and highest purpose," and said that it "marked the end of an era" before American political life was taken over by consultants and pollsters. It is also featured as the prologue of his book, Politics Lost.

Trump Smacking Amazon While Afrikan Liberation Peddling "Neurospeculative AfroFeminist" Cloth

thenextweb |  The Guardian reports Berlin-bound artist and independent researcher Adam Harvey is developing a new technology which aims to overwhelm and confuse computer vision systems by feeding them false information.

The Hyperface Project, as Harvey calls it, revolves around printing deceitful patterns onto attire and textiles with the purpose of rendering your face illegible to surveillance systems.

The method essentially dodges facial recognition by presenting computer vision devices with an overload of patterns closely resembling facial features like eyes and mouths.

As Harvey explains, the Hyperface technology ultimately prevents computers from scanning your face by inundating “an algorithm with what it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm.”

The patterns, which Harvey developed in collaboration with interaction studio Hyphen-Labs, can then be worn to shield off the areas facial recognition systems seek to interpret.

MIT |  Sue Ding interviewed the creators of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, an ambitious and richly imagined project at this year’s Sundance New Frontier.  Artists Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ashley Baccus Clark, Nitzan Bartov, and Ece Tankal are part of of Hyphen-Labs, a global team of women of color who are doing pioneering work at the intersection of art, technology, and science. Together they draw on a formidable range of expertise, including engineering, molecular biology, game design, and architecture.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism consists of three components. The first is an installation that transports visitors to a futuristic and stylish beauty salon. Speculative products designed for women of color are displayed around the space. They include sunscreen for dark skin, a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software, earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations, and a reflective visor that lets wearers see out while hiding their faces.

The second part of the project is a VR experience that takes place at a “neurocosmetology lab” in the future. Participants see themselves in the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they are about to receive Octavia Electrodes—cutting edge technology involving both hair extensions and brain-stimulating electrical currents. In the VR narrative, the electrodes then prompt a hallucination that carries viewers through a psychedelic Afrofuturist space landscape.

The final component of the project is Hyphen-Labs’ ongoing research about how VR can affect viewers, potentially reducing bias and fear by immersing participants in positive, engaging portrayals of black women. The team would eventually like to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to study how  participants respond to the experience.

Old Triple-Dipper Still Out Hustling Gwalla in These Streets...,

NYTimes  |  Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.

The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington.

“They’re very optimistic,” Mr. Dole said of the Taiwanese in an interview on Tuesday. “They see a new president, a Republican, and they’d like to develop a closer relationship.”

The United States’ One China policy is nearly four decades old, Mr. Dole said, referring to the policy established in 1979 that denies Taiwan official diplomatic recognition but maintains close contacts, promoting Taiwan’s democracy and selling it advanced military equipment.

Paying Full Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Time |  In many ways this is the job Podesta has dreamed about for 20 years, though his first interaction with Hillary Clinton in her husband’s White House didn’t suggest it would ever happen. When Podesta was staff secretary, the then White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty gave Podesta an extra job: handling the scandals of Bill Clinton’s first term. “You needed to isolate those as much as you can and keep the staff focused on the president and his agenda,” McLarty said. “I asked John to spear head that. He was superb.”

As part of that job, Podesta headed up the internal investigation on Travelgate, a scandal started when Hillary Clinton in May 1993 helped direct the firing of seven people from the travel office—usually non-political staff who continue through changes of Administrations. Ultimately, several investigations found the firings were inappropriate and most of the staff was reinstated. Podesta’s report was surprisingly critical of the First Lady’s role. Though no charges ever came of the scandal, the affair left Podesta in her doghouse. But the two policy wonks weren’t estranged for long. “When he left the White House he said to me he’d only go back for one job: Hillary’s chief of staff,” John’s brother Tony Podesta recalls. John Podesta declined to comment on the record for this story.

Podesta did eventually go back for other jobs, becoming Bill’s chief of staff in the final years—weathering Monica Lewinsky and impeachment with his friendships with both Clintons still in tact, that in itself a marvel. Though Podesta wouldn’t directly work for the Clintons again for years, he remained a key player in their orbit, publicly encouraging her to run for the Senate; helping raise money with his brother, with whom he co-founded Washington’s fourth largest lobbying firm, the Podesta Group; and then with the blessings and support of both Clintons launching his think tank, the Center for American Progress in 2003.

thought leadership

cbc |  Pat Kelly vividly remembers when he first knew he was a "thought leader":

"In 2005, I met another 'thought leader' and I asked him how he became a 'thought leader' and he said 'I don't know.' It was then that I knew I could be one too."

Kelly proved his skill at leading thoughts on the This Is That Talks stage this past April in Whistler, BC. As you can see in the video of his talk, Kelly confidently made grand statements, spoke with his hands, and had slides - all hallmarks of a true "thought leader" or "influencer."

"My talk was a big success: I said things and the audience nodded their heads."

Based on the success of his talk, Kelly hopes to appear on a number of podcasts about "big ideas."

soul'd-out blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil pocahantas all-in for Granny Goodness

bostonglobe |  “I’m ready,” Warren said in an interview with The Globe. “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”

She added: “I’m supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a fighter, a fighter with guts.”

Asked whether Clinton should release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, Warren said: “That’s for her to decide — there will be a whole lot of issues to talk about over the next several months.”

Sanders frequently calls on Clinton to release them.

She praised Sanders, saying that he has run an “incredible campaign.”

Warren, a champion of the left who passed up a presidential bid of her own, despite the urging of legions of followers, is uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the establishment candidacy of Clinton and Sanders supporters, who are being forced to come to terms with the Vermont senator’s loss.

Democrats view the freshman Massachusetts senator as a path of sorts to party unity, which helps explain an upsurge in buzz about Warren as a potential vice presidential pick. Senators and top staff say talking up Warren for vice president is a way to show Sanders and his millions of followers that the party establishment heard them loud and clear.

Warren and Clinton haven’t always been close — Warren called out Clinton in her book “The Two Income Trap” for switching her vote on legislation to overhaul bankruptcy laws when Clinton was in the Senate.

“Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble,” Warren wrote in a biting critique of the episode in which Clinton sided with the financial services sector and helped pass an industry-friendly overhaul of the bankruptcy laws.

Warren did not directly address the issue when asked about it Thursday. Instead, Warren told the Globe, “She’s someone who has had to take on a lot, and she’s going to fight back.”

Uppity Dr. Baraka REDUX Originally Posted 4/12/08

The "condescending, elitist, UPPITY" Dr. Baraka had the audacity to touch and diagnose the angry and cancerous boil accumulating on the atrophying carcass of the American economy;

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I wrote about this a couple years ago at Vision Circle. Baraka has spoken to and will now be compelled to fully engage around one of the most challenging bulwarks of reality evasion in America. Joe Bageant understood it and spoke to it very, very well.

I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:

Good luck and godspeed. If he can successfully engage these folks, alay their anger and mistrust, he has a better than even chance of becoming president and potentially even functioning as a catalyst for constructive change. This is easily the most interesting moment thus far in the democrat primary.

clock in a box unleashed fifty megatons of stoopid...,

guardian |  The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins found himself at the centre of controversy on Sunday when he questioned the motives of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old boy who was arrested and detained in Texas when a teacher thought a clock he had made was a bomb.

Dawkins did not dispute that Mohamed should not have been arrested, but questioned whether the boy had truly “invented” the clock, as has been reported. 

Dawkins, the author of books including the groundbreaking The Selfish Gene, the bestselling The God Delusion and the memoir A Sense of Wonder, is a leading critic of religious belief and an advocate for rational thought. 

On Sunday, the emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford said he was simply looking for the truth of the Texas schoolboy’s story.

In a tweet, the scientist linked to a YouTube video entitled Ahmed Mohammed [sic] Clock is a FRAUD, in which user Thomas Talbot alleges Mohamed’s clock “is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing”.

Dawkins eventually retreated. He devoted tweets to questioning police motives and tweeted a reference to the new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party: “Sorry if I go a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy’s alleged ‘invention’ but also media lies about J[eremy] Corbyn.”

the psychopathologizing of anti-authoritarian behavior?

zerohedge  |  This post is about an issue that is by now a bit dated (though the topic as such certainly isn’t), but we have only just become aware of it and it seemed to us worth rescuing it from the memory hole. In late 2013, the then newest issue of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) defined a new mental illness, the so-called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.

As TheMindUnleashed.org informs us, the definition of this new mental illness essentially amounts to declaring any non-conformity and questioning of authority as a form of insanity. According to the manual, ODD is defined as:

[…] an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

Note: I believe this article strongly misrepresents the childhood diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder  - but - it is consistent with a Gurdjieffian account of human psychology as well as very amusing.  A couple of the comments appended at zerohedge are priceless.

The Gurdjieffian Appeal - REDUX (originally posted 12/26/07)

Gurdjieff was engaged in the practical study of hypnotism between 1900 and 1908. He worked at it in connection with curing people of alcoholism and opium addiction, and with various other influences that increase suggestibility and diminish the power of personal initiative. During those years, Gurdjieff was trying to see whether he could establish a practical means for helping people with this grave condition.

Suggestibility is one of the central causes of contemporary malaise. It is a derivative weakness that is more serious than most people nowadays are prepared to admit. We are all familiar with the concept of political and advertising propaganda, but erroneously believe ourselves personally and individually immune from the same. The overwhelming majority of people have no idea about the history and practical exploitation of suggestibility as a primary instrumentality of governance.

Contemporary with the rise of the exploitation of suggestibility as a governance methodology, i.e., he saw and responded to the problem while it was yet in its infancy - Gurdjieff undertook to discover the means by which people could be delivered from this psychic weakness. Gurdjieff was decades ahead of his time - concerned as he was with something critically important to us all - long before anyone else gained a retrospective understanding of what was being done, by whom it was being done, and how it was being done. In addition to taking on the symptom of suggestibility, and its exploitation by elites as a primary governance methodology, Gurdjieff also endeavored to provide a means by which individuals could train and condition their psychic machinery to realize its full possible range of functioning.

Behind the general condition of suggestibility lurks a generalized and woeful ignorance of human nature. This is one of the most awkward aspects of our general situation. People believe that they know themselves, know their own internal nature, but nothing could be further from the truth. Where precisely does one come upon a deep and sound education concerning the nature of his/her psychic apparatus? Home and family? School? Church? Place of employment? The fact of the matter is that it simply never happens. Education in the methods of self-knowledge are infinitely more fragmentary and sporadic than simple sex education. We're neither provided with a user manual for basic operation of our organism, and, the institutions which shape and control our lives' attention don't trouble themselves to provide such a manual.

Why should they?

Knowing so much about the external nature of the world and of ourselves, and knowing so very little about our own internal nature makes us very easy and very cost effective to govern. As long as people can be made to work very effectively on the outside, while kept weak, ignorant, and ineffectual on the inside, we are as lambs under the care of wolves.

The basic illusion by which we are kept docile and governable is rooted in the nature of consciousness cultivated and permitted within our embedding culture. What we ordinarily call consciousness is only a reflection of true consciousness. True consciousness is the reverse of what men ordinarily call consciousness. To the extent that we learn this fact, and go beyond knowledge to practice, and effect a reversal of the ordinary waking state, i.e., make what is in our subconsciousness the agent and center of what we call our consciousness

why did stern and silber turn a blind eye to the slumlord billionaire all this time?

Donald Sterling -- NEW AUDIO RELEASED ... I Put Food on Black People's Tables

rsn |  Sterling is narcissistic and CliffsNotes literate enough to present himself as a self-made Gatsbian figure. He even has “white parties” at his Bevery Hills home where guests all wear white “like in the book.” He’s a Gatsbian who never read The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was running from his past, hiding his rough background behind the artifice of taste and wealth. Sterling presents himself as the tony developer of high-end properties in the Hollywood Hills, and plays it much closer to the street. Sterling is also the Slumlord Billionaire, a man who made his fortune by building low-income housing, and then, according to a Justice Department lawsuit, developing his own racial quota system to decide who gets the privilege of renting his properties. In November of 2009, Sterling settled the suit with the US Department of Justice for $2.73 million, the largest ever obtained by the government in a discrimination case involving apartment rentals. Reading the content of the suit makes you want to shower with steel wool. Sterling just said no to rent to non-Koreans in Koreatown and just said hell-no to African-Americans looking for property in plush Beverly Hills. Sterling, who has a Blagojevichian flair for the language, says he did not like to rent to “Hispanics” because “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” He also stated that “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”

The Slumlord Billionaire has a healthy legal paper trail, which creates a collage of someone very good at extorting rents from the very poor. In 1986, the spiking of rents in his Beverly Hills properties—the so-called “slums of Beverly Hills”—led to a large march by tenants on City Hall.

Former NBA commissioner David Stern, always so PR-conscious when it comes to where players mingle, how players dress, whom players consort with after hours, has turned a blind eye to this disturbing pattern. Now these chickens have returned to Stern’s back porch to roost. There is a second racism lawsuit buzzing around Sterling’s helmet of hair.

Sterling’s other lawsuit comes from inside his own NBA offices: his long-time general manager Elgin Baylor. Baylor, an NBA legend with the Los Angeles Lakers, has spent more than two decades making a series of personnel decisions that have ranged from depressing to enraging. Baylor’s was called without irony by a television commentator as “veteran of the lottery process” watching the ping-pong balls bounce around to see who gets the number-one pick. The Clippers draft picks under Baylor’s tenure—and their entire roster—have largely been a dyspeptic horror show. According to Baylor, one reason for their continued ineptitude was Sterling in telling Baylor he wanted to fill his team with “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach.” 

the decline of christian spirituality in the roman catholic religious organization

digilander | Tracking the history of the decline of authentic spirituality in the Roman Catholic Religious Organization [RCRO] has many key events or points that cannot be all listed here in a single post. The best thing is to enter this topic gradually. There is method behind how topics are introduced.

Even the RCRO was at first highly critical of what was called "devotio moderna" during the late medieval and early modern period. But since its own authentically spiritual tradition was effectively dying (murdered by the RCRO itself), there was a void that could not withstand the flood of modern devotionalism. Modern devotionalism is the kind of emotionalism that the older Spiritual Directors warned against. It was called enthusiasmos, mania, and hysteria. It is a selfish, self-preoccupied, and auto-erotic narcissistic concern for being right and correct, often in the eyes of others and oneself.

The very basic difference between spirituality and the pseudo-spirituality of this emotionalism (that has deep ramifications to brought out later when we discuss the differences between nous, dianoia, ethical and intellectual virtues, and so on) is to be find in some of the older catechism "talks" some exceptional Fathers had with adult converts who were recently Baptized/Chrismated (originally, the instruction was the night after chrismation when the newly chrismated stayed in the church with the Bishop or Father). In the talks that have been recorded, there is a consistency from the 5th century to the 19th century that reveals the catholicity of these instructions. So, I summarize them.

The niptic Fathers teach that the type of emotionalism that characterizes the western forms of modern devotion are to be avoided. It is true, for example, that one is to try to pray with all one's thought, feeling, and attention focussed on the prayer even at the stage of verbal prayer. But such as we contra-naturally are, we do not have the power to attend fully and faithfully (its a lost natural capacity that needs to be regained as a skilled habit), nor the right attitude or feeling and any attempt on our part to emotionally try to feel the right feeling is imagination. We must work solely with focussing our thought (by stilling) and attention, and then, the prayer will teach us what to feel, how to worship, and elicit the appropriate response from us if and only if we are participating seriously in the ethical askesis and liturgical life of the Church as prior and contextual conditioning, so to speak. Without these other two, our soul's are not the previously furrowed or prepared "raw material" that can be appropriately worked on towards transformation.

This is why the Church gives us formal prayers to "recite" and the Psalms. We do not know what to feel or how to pray and need to be taught. In modern times, even the praiseworthy attempt to be deeply attentive is misguided. The attempt to attend takes the form as a concern with what to think, what to feel, and what to imagine during prayers and Divine Services. This is precisely to be as consumed, as distracted, and as dissipated in one's own self-preoccupied fantasies of being a good worshipper as the fellow thinking about his meal, and perhaps, football game and nap after the Liturgy.

Such a state of mind and its concerns is the exact opposite of the sober wakefulness needed. Lets call it "self-meddling preoccupation with one's attitude." One is just to attend to the prayers and Divine Services with a certain fullness of presence. In the beginning, one may feel cold. One has no feeling for these things. One is impatient. One's feet or back hurts. One's kids are an irritating embarrassment and you hope others didn't notice. That puts you in a bad mood of which you feel ashamed, and so, you do not try to make the effort attend because you feel unworthy, and thus, don't FEEL like it. Again, one falls into making it an issue of emotion. One is always catching oneself distracted, irritated, and inattentive. One notices how this insight may also lead one to forget again to try to just attend. To notice this is a first moment of discrimination (diakrisis).

Fantasy begins when I try to search for a way to give myself or make myself have the appropriate attitudes and feelings. Make no attempt to feel what one thinks one should feel. That is the role of the Holy Spirit through the Services, Psalms, Prayers, and Hymnography of the Church. Instead, noting one's distraction, irritability, pain, (pseudo-spiritual) passional concern over what to feel, and inattention, try again to just attend. Listen. This is the first baby step in dispassion (apatheia).

By contrast, the emotionalism of modern devotionalism is passional quicksand. Intensified, it can become refined into many fine shades of erotomania (eroticism and mania - manic).

michelle obama/anne romney - spousal convention speeches: your thoughts?

the origins and future of occupy wall street

New Yorker | White reached Lasn by telephone shortly before nine. Lasn was in the bathtub, and White told him details that he had learned online about the eviction. The police had established a strict media cordon, blocking access from nearby streets. “It was a military-style operation,” he said. These words made Lasn think of the bloody uprising in Syria. He quickly decided that the apparent end of Zuccotti was not a tragedy but the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities, what he calls “revolutionary moments,” akin to the slapping of a Tunisian fruit vender. “I just can’t believe how stupid Bloomberg can be!” he said to me later that day. “This means escalation. A raising of the stakes. It’s one step closer to, you know, a revolution.”

Lasn and White quickly hammered out a post-Zuccotti plan. White would draft a new memorandum, suggesting that Phase I—signs, meetings, camps, marches—was now over. Phase II would involve a swarming strategy of “surprise attacks against business as usual,” with the potential to be “more intense and visceral, depending on how the Bloombergs of the world react.” White could hear the excitement in Lasn’s voice. Even as Lasn vented about the morning’s counterrevolution, he was doing what he could not to splash.

This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between Lasn and White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that “America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was “very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make this happen.” He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.

“No. 1 is best,” Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.

White, who is twenty-nine years old, was born to a Caucasian mother and an African-American father. “I don’t really fit in with either group,” he told me. He attended suburban public schools, where he began a series of one-man campaigns against authority. In middle school, with his parents’ blessing, he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In high school, he founded an atheists’ club, over the objections of the principal. This led to an appearance on “Politically Incorrect,” and atheist organizations flew White to their conferences to give talks. “It all went to my head,” he said. “I became a little ego child. Ego destroys. I was too young to understand that.”

Though he describes himself as a “mystical anarchist,” White has three strict rules that govern his day: No naps. No snacks. Get dressed. “By dressed,” he told me, “I mean pants and a shirt. Enough so that if someone came to the door and knocked on it you wouldn’t be totally embarrassed.” After earning a B.A. at Swarthmore, he wrote a letter to Lasn, whom he had never met, saying that he would be arriving in Vancouver in a matter of weeks and wanted to be put to work.

Lasn was born in Estonia, but his earliest memories are of German refugee camps, where his family ended up after fleeing the Russian Army during the Second World War. He remembers falling asleep on a cot as his uncles talked about politics with his father, a tennis champion who buried his trophies in the back yard before rushing the family onto one of the last boats to Germany. “World wars, revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen,” he told me. “When the moment is right, all it takes is a spark.”

Lasn’s family left the refugee camp for Australia, where he grew up. He has a degree in applied mathematics, and he began his career designing computer war games for the Australian military. Using this expertise, he started a market-research company in Tokyo during Japan’s postwar boom, where, by feeding punch cards into an I.B.M. mainframe, he created reports for consumer brands, many of them alcohol and tobacco products. “It’s easy to generate cool if you have the bucks, the celebrities, the right ideas, the right slogans,” he says. “You can throw ideas into the culture that then have a life of their own.” He made a lot of money, travelled around the world, moved to Canada, and devoted himself to experimental filmmaking and environmental protection. In 1989, when the CBC refused to sell him airtime for a thirty-second “mind bomb” aimed at the forestry industry, Lasn realized that his politics would never have a place within the mass media. With Bill Schmalz, an outdoorsman who had worked with him as a cameraman, Lasn founded Adbusters.

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